After nearly three months since the last release, out comes
linux-wlan-ng 0.2.7, with
changes to support current Linux kernels, plus a few more bugfixes.

The project remains completely obselete, having been nearly
completely eclipsed by the drivers in the linux kernel, but it continues
to have a few differentiating features, the most significant of which is
support for Prism 2/2.5/3 USB widgets.

It's funny; The very split-MAC architechure that linux-wlan-ng was
derided for is the future of Linux wireless -- And the same problems are
coming up in almost the same order, as are the same mistakes, and
with them the inevitable conclusion that some of these problems are
hard.

Sometimes I really dislike that I spend most of my time hacking on
proprietary code -- linux-wlan and linux-wlan-ng were my employer's
experiment with open-source code, and it almost put us out of business.
If we can't get paid for support, and we can't get paid to write
software, how exactly are we supposed to pay the bills?

Is the entire F/OSS "business model" subsidized by proprietary
components?

One of my life goals is to watch the sun come up from
different place (or better yet, a different continent) every year, but
the last couple of years I haven't had the money to travel anywhere, so
I had to content myself with finding a different local vantage point
this time around. Fortunately, that's pretty easy!

Today I almost missed it -- I set an alarm but forgot to turn it on
-- but I managed to find a nice place to watch the sun come up, despite
the objections of a few pelicans.

Back in May, I inherited Photo Organizer, and since
then, there have been four releases. Nothing earth-shattering, but a
steady series of incremental improvements, usually in the form of
feature backports from the "unstable" tree.

The single biggest feature of the "unstable" tree is the use of CSS
for layout and other formatting, plus other changes necessary to support
better theming and internationalization. The work is well advanced, but
I'm running into a few walls.

First, I can't seem to figure out how to have truly marginless
<button>s. I'm using graphical buttons for things like next/prev
links, but try as I may, I end up with a small (~few pixels) margin
around the embedded image. This doesn't matter for most of the
buttons, but there is a subset used for navigation and this results in
the navbar being unacceptaby wide.

The navigation buttons are being used as implicit <a href>
tags, which raises the question "why not just use the tag then?" --
basically, I want everything using the same mechanism, if at all
possible. As most of these buttons/links appear within multiple forms
(and occasionally standalone) I can't use <input type="image">
tags because of their implicit submit on click. On the plus side
their borders/margins can be disabled!

Second, I can't seem to figure out how to have a proper 'onmouseover'
event when hovering over a button. The button normally pops up a little
tooltip (via the title attritubte), but I want to pop up a
thumbnail of the next/prev image when the mouse hovers over the button
as well as the tooltip. I could probably hack something together via a
hidden <div>, but I'm almost over my head as it is.

The goal of these buttons is to enable a pure-text interface, making
it trivial to translate it into different languages -- and the crucial
bit is that the rest of the code can't care what the UI looks like.

Hacking HTML/Javascript/CSS/DOM is a far cry from the kernel-land
hackery I spend most of my time in. To say nothing of my
continuing distaste of PHP!

It's a fact of life that on any trip, you inevitably forget
something. Last time I, I forgot shampoo. This time, I forgot my Djembe, so I resigned
myself to walking around the park with my camera, taking nearly 1200
photos during the three-day event. Unusually, I ended up with more good
photos than bad. I must be getting better!

This one is the best photo of the lot. It just exudes cuteness, and
aside from the trash can visible in the background, is perfect:

This one is another favorite. This young lady had a particular grace
about her. It's hard to capture the essence of graceful motion in a
still photograph, but I think it works here:

In other news, I'm going to try and do a picture-of-the-day from now
on. Consider it an early new year's resolution or something.

Note to Advogato: Most posts won't have anything to
do with Free Software -- and nanoblogger doesn't currently
generate a separate feed for each category. Is there a way to filter?
(Does anyone care)?

As I type this, I'm listening to Lacuna Coil's latest album,
Karmacode. Their trademark dark, haunting vocals and off-key
melodies are as evocative as ever.

Ah, Goth Rock. Raw, angstful, and powerful.

Yet, as always, it's the power ballads that pack the most punch for me;
They have all of the bands's power on-tap, but rather than throw it in
our face, it's barely restrained, each note hinting at the beast caged
within.

While the raw power draws out the angst, focused restraint builds the
necessary realization and understanding needed to channel that raw power
into a way to lift yourself up and out.

This isn't the first time Lacuna Coil has done that for me. Their
music has seen me through several turning points in my life. Sort of
the right thing at the right time.

It's odd, the way you don't notice something slipping away until it's
completely gone and suddenly comes back and smacks you in the face with
its full force.

The soundtrack of my life's been..well, silent. There are, of
course, many small reasons, all fairly insignificant, but their
cumulative reprocussions have been fairly extensive. It's nice that I'm
coming out of this extensive rut..

I _really_ need to re-skin my djembe. It has that raw power that
my little doumbeks, while tons of fun, just can't touch. Only a month
left until the next Paralounge drum
gathering!

...Meanwhile, Lacuna Coil's drummer still rides the cymbals
far more than is healty. But I guess that means I still have my
hearing, eh?

I don't know how to describe just how engrossing this game was; they
did everything right. It's the feeling you get after reading a
particularly good book; you turn the last page.. and there's no more.
The world you'd been living in is suddenly gone, and you feel empty.

The characters were real people, well written and voiced. Epic scale
and consequence, life-and-death emotional impact. Excellent music and
atmosphere. In short, it has a living, breathing world. It's all
there.

Everything, that is... but the ending.

This wasn't the "set things up for a sequel" ending, but more like a
"where's the rest? The last quarter of the book is missing!" kind of
ending.

They'd better not take another seven years to make the sequel (probably
to be called "The Longest Journey: Undreaming"); there are just too many
unrequited plot arcs left hanging.

Jarring ending aside, Dreamfall leaves you wondering what is actually
real, dreams within dreams, and all that. Very few stories have done
this to me.

What is our continued fascination with other peoples' dreams? How
are they somehow more real than our own, our own lives? Those who can
make their dreams happen are powerful (and dangerous!) indeed.

It could be argued that this "everything left hanging" ending was
completely in line with the game's story; it is up to us to dream the
ending ourselves, even as the "Undreaming" threatens the world.

Perhaps the blurb about "getting the word out so all of this wasn't
in vain" was also about needing to dream up enough sales for them to
realize the conclusion of this amazing story.

So, go and pick up a copy of both The Longest Journey and
Dreamfall, and discover just how good adventure games can get.